One day, a year or two ago, near the corner of Cathedral and Franklin Streets
in Baltimore, my attention was caught by what seemed to be an ordinary city
bus. I watched its blue-and-white flank creep past me for several long seconds
before I figured out what was odd about it: there were no ads. Nobody was
telling me, in eye-level full color, about the 10 o'clock news or a new ATM
card or the state lottery. The only image the bus conjured was, well,
bus. It was as if a continual and annoying noise had abruptly ceased.

The moment would probably have passed unnoticed, but for the fact that a
little while earlier I'd been reading, in an issue of the Baffler, an
essay arguing that advertising in public space was tantamount to vandalism, and
was therefore the first step in urban rot. That particular piece from the
acerbic Chicago-based culture-criticism journal didn't make it into
Commodify Your Dissent, a collection of writings from the magazine's
past five years. But the book offers plenty in the same spirit: today's
advertising, writes Baffler associate editor Tom Vanderbilt in "The
Advertised Life," "penetrates the cognitive process, invading consciousness to
such a point that one expects and looks for advertising, learns to lead life as
an ad, to think like an advertiser, and even to anticipate and insert oneself
into successful strategies of marketing."

This invasion, the Baffler argues, takes place as much in academia as
at the shopping mall. "Postmodernism is the cultural logic of late
capitalism," writes the Baffler's staff, paraphrasing Marxist theorist
Fredric Jameson, in the book's introduction. Scholars in the past decade
believed that consumption was a form of free self-expression, they argue, "that
the noble consumer used the dross with which he or she was bombarded to fashion
little talismans of rebellion and subversion." The underlying assumption --
that the fundamental purpose of society is to let people buy and sell stuff --
goes unchallenged.

The observation that artificial rebellion helps shore up capitalism is hardly
a new one. But the Baffler's gift is for exposing the way the parts of
the process fit together, and for underscoring -- in an age when the hot
commodities are information and ideas -- the stakes and consequences of it all.
Another touchstone piece in the book, "Why Johnny Can't Dissent," by
Baffler cofounder Tom Frank, relates familiar examples of
corporate-sponsored "subversive" imagery (such as William Burroughs's
commercials for Nike) to excerpts from business-management texts urging people
to "hail defiance of the rules," then brings in the bootstrapping, all-American
message of punk superstar Henry Rollins to tie it into one ideological bundle:
"The countercultural idea . . . is more the official doctrine of
corporate America than it is a program of resistance. What we understand as
'dissent' does not subvert, does not challenge, does not even question the
cultural faiths of Western business . . . . Hip is their
official ideology."

Against such hipness, the Baffler wields a combative and agressively
erudite style (not only does the word chiliastic appear in the book, but
it's used figuratively). It is not a humble publication. At times, the writers
belabor easy points ("bands like Pearl Jam are almost universally recognized to
suck . . . [they are] watery, derivative, and strictly second rate");
at others, they let an interesting argument slide by as an offhand put-down. An
entire essay could be built from Bill Boisvert's passing assertion that the
small-business owner -- for whom Congress is always cutting taxes -- is "the
least productive member of the least productive sector of the economy.

By and large, though, the Baffler's contributors are inquisitive and
thoughtful, whether they're analyzing the corporate use of Franklin Planner
personal organizers ("quintessentially American -- simultaneously wholesome and
insane") or the liberal vision of urban life ("a nonstop alternative-lifestyle
carnival"). Everything is ripe for reconsideration, even such favorites of the
educated classes as the old Spy magazine ("offering helpful consumer
hints in the guise of snobbish put-downs").

If that seems an unattainable level of ideological purity, well, it is. The
Baffler is haunted by the unspoken knowledge that its intelligent,
clued-in writers and readers have the very sensibilities that pay off in the
dread culture industry. Thus, noise-rock pioneer Steve Albini, who contributes
a piece on "The Problem with Music," has applied his matchless skills as a
recording engineer to the most recent album by the million-selling Bush, who
are castigated elsewhere in Commodify Your Dissent for being a mediocre
bunch of phonies.

But the Baffler sets a valuable standard nonetheless. Some of the
topics in the new book may seem outdated -- whatever happened to Pearl Jam or
Details, anyway? -- but the machinery that made them churns onward.
Advertising has taken over the Internet faster and more thoroughly than even
the Baffler imagined; people who were formerly being sorted into market
niches are now, thanks to services such as Firefly, being dissolved entirely
into a field of consumer probabilities. Business culture, Frank writes in a
downcast closing essay, "is putting itself beyond our power of imagining
because it has become our imagination." The power of Commodify Your
Dissent is that it imagines something else.